Michael Jeter & Brittany Murphy

Day 9 -- Monday June 30

The chase continues. This is Day 2 of 4 that involve the bar fight and ensuing chase. Today and tomorrow the chase has taken everybody to an old-fashioned roadside revival, at which Oras and Zack try to shake the bullies.

We opened the day with our revival arrival, driving the pick-up truck over some rough terrain as we approached the revival tent. That was pretty fun. Next we shot the end of the scene as Zack and Oras speed away, using Reba as their "passport" to elude the bullies. That involved more macho posturing with no written lines, a running theme in the script. And, as has been the case in many scenes, we shot no specific coverage of the bullies. We were in the background of certain shots, but no one cared to close in on the bad guys. It underlined that the revival stop was just a contrivance to get Zack & Reba together. (Like they're important?!?)

That took up a good chunk of the day. The last shot we got was inside the revival tent. We shot a "master" of the entire scene: the fiery Reverend Poole (Don McManus), the arrival of the chasees, then the chasers, Oras is touched by the spirit, Oras touches Zack (with the spirit), and everyone goes running off. We bullies were directed to get into the spirit of the revival, yelling & dancing & clapping. Fine.

Well, not so fine. It didn't make sense to me that we would come into the tent hell-bent on roughing up these two and then be completely swayed by the activities. So I approached Nicole, the director, and she, Rick, Groove and I had a little pow-wow. In the grand spirit of compromise, I was able to convince her to let us do exactly what I wanted. Rusty and Shank get into it, but Don does not. (Actually, that is a compromise because I wuuld have preferred that just Rusty get into it.) Then, when Oras and Zack get up, we don't buy any of it any more. So we ran that and it went smoothly enough to be a decent master. It's going to take lots of close-ups to get everybody in the scene. Let's hope there's something in it for the bullies, too.

The wind was gusting over 50 miles an hour today, so with that we called it a day. The tent was taking a fair beating from the wind and it was deemed safer and easier to just start the coverage of the scene tomorrow. That's all that has to be done tomorrow, so it should be a relatively uninteresting day as we run the scene over and over and over and...

Just an update on the housing. Since SAG was brought in on the case last Wednesday... Grodnik did not return their call Wednesday, then he plead his case to Patricia on Thursday, then did not return Elizabeth Mosley's call on Friday, then when reminded today by Eve to call her, he replied, "I'll call her tomorrow." So two weeks have passed now since my agent first called to get me moved to the Residence Inn and no progress has been made because Dan Grodnik doesn't care enough about me to return the phone calls.

Go on to Day 10

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